The entire gambling lootboxes were massively popularized by Valve, turning Team Fortress 2 from pay2play to predatory gambling.

External sound cards have the advantage of less electrical interference, but usually the internal ones have external power not coming from the PCIe slot so it isn’t a big problem. Asus left the market leaving you with good old Creative Sound Blaster again. Choose whatever your budget allows, the two upper tier ones just differ in accessories, but that might have changed. And AV receivers the same, I am not the up to date audio guy what is a good deal. Just try to stay >120 dB SNR on sound cards for high end.

Don’t search for computer speakers, just look for normal speakers on which I can’t help out too much on. Unless you want to invest into an expensive sound card, you probably should go for an AV-Receiver which transmits the audio through HDMI as this will give you the maximum quality depending on the supported formats. I have a sound card -> old school amplifier -> speaker setup. Basically it is your choice where the digital to analogue transformation happens, whether through a receiver or sound card. A sound card does have the massive advantage of providing virtual headphone surround sound (yes on stereo headphones, and no, this is really working) which receivers typically don’t have, because reasons and it will provide you with a massive immersion boost. And no onboard sound is not comparable, even the best one is a clear step down.

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FC are just social groups, not raid content. For that you should recruit statics or communities which organize old synchronized content.

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In over half of America it would have been legal as the age of consent is above 16 or 17. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ages_of_consent_in_the_United_States

This isn’t a child, it is almost an adult in the legal sense quite literally. Your entire point of a crime have taken place has just no ground to stand on.

There were inappropriate messages, but sexting wasn’t mentioned so far and I doubt the exact details will be known. A meeting in a public place like Twitch Con is better than some back alley.

Thanks to resorting to personal attacks, but I am bothered so much by this, because this situation makes shitty behavior as in cheating on his wife almost the same as actual rape and abuse cases. And that takes away resources in prevention and investigation where it is needed. I grew up with the Michael Jackson smear campaigns and social media just proliferated this type of abuse.

It wouldn’t qualify for that as depending on the country people can consent at that age. And we speak of a difference of a single year anyways. There is a reason people bring up marriage and age difference up instead, because it simply isn’t pedophilia. Current societal definition: “Psychiatric diagnostic criteria for pedophilia extend the cut-off point for prepubescence to age 13.”

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I can’t believe somebody would type this for serious. First the jump between talking over text to rape is quite a long line in between. It is like us two disagreeing and me murdering you. And rape means non-consensual sexual intercourse. And given the age of 17 years, even if they would have consented, it wouldn’t be rape, as the person has enough emotional and sexual maturity to understand what it means. Now, it might be not legal in some jurisdictions, but this is just beyond wild proving my point people just want to make shit up.

FFXIV has quite literally a Fellowship and Community Finder to look for groups which have similar interests as you. Be it Mahjongg, Role-Playing, Try-Harding old content or seeing for LGBTQ interactions. And the rest is done over Discord, because that is for sure a better communication tool than whatever the game devs can come up with. Even the content thing is not true. There is seperate content which absolutely requires cooperation, schedules outside the cookie cutter main content like Bozja and Deep/Criterion Dungeons. More similar to old school MMOs. I’m fine with a diverse array of content.

A pedophile predator is somebody who systematically texts underage people, and fishes out the vulnerable ones to exploit their weaknesses for their own satisfaction and exerts control over them. Speaking to a single, depending on the jurisdiction (±1 year), consenting adult (17 is young, but not completely stupid), with slightly flirty messages is absolutely not that. it isn’t even toxic. in fact, it devalues this tag for behaviour which is not cool due to the cheating and a bit skittish because of the age difference, but is otherwise kind of okay. See, next time somebody tells me about a pedophile predator I will be thinking about a conversation between two adults, or almost adult and not nasty abuse scarring people for life.

Yeah, he is mainly a cheater on his wife. Not exactly great, but conversations on this sound like by people who never leave their basement and talk to people.

It is the pedohile predator messages that get me, when we talk about text flirting with a 17 year old. That is just not the scale of an issue people blow it out to be. People are like a rape-murder case almost happened. It is beyond ridicolous.

Still not a pedophile nor a predator even for flirting. This is not a 12 year old, but in many jurisdictions a responsible adult.

The great thing with your logic is no matter what he does he is guilty for you anyways. Great logic.

That is not the words you should use for a 17 year old he didn’t even know was underage.

You should still buy sound cards as they are significantly better, at least the ones in the 100€ range. Just because there are premium mainboards with acceptable sound doesn’t mean it is great.

At least something.